
NOTE: in this plain text file I have adopted the "latex" convention of
enclosing an italicised word in braces preceded by "\em"
like {\em this}.

                   A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO CONSCIOUSNESS
                    (HOW TO AVOID TALKING NONSENSE?)

                              Aaron Sloman
                       School of Computer Science
                      The University of Birmingham
                      Email: A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
                   WWW: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/

[This is a summary of a lecture presented at the Royal Society of Arts
on 26th Feb 1996. The slides used for the lecture are available at
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/consciousness.lecture.ps ]


I am embarrassed to be writing about consciousness because my impression
is that nearly everything written about it, even by distinguished
scientists and philosophers, is mostly rubbish and will generally be
seen to be rubbish at some time in the future, perhaps two hundred years
from now. This means that my own work is probably also rubbish.

However I shall outline some ways in which we can hope to make progress
through collaborative, multi-disciplinary research. By doing this work
we are sure to learn {\em something}!

First, I need to distinguish three different types of questions,
empirical questions, design questions and conceptual questions. Design
questions are at the heart of our problems.

Empirical questions are about what exists in the world, what is
correlated with what and what happens if you poke it, give it electric
shocks or whatever. Much empirical research is interesting and valuable,
until the researchers start claiming that they have discovered something
important about consciousness, as if consciousness were a well defined
topic, and a proper object of research, like influenza, magnetism, or
carbon. I believe that there is no unique, clearly identified concept.
Therefore much of what is written about how experimental results relate
to consciousness is ambiguous and muddled, even if the experiments
themselves are interesting and tell us useful things about human or
animal brains, such as which bits of the brain react to which sorts of
sensory stimulation.

Design questions are about what kind of mechanisms and capabilities can
be put together in various ways in order to achieve various richer kinds
of capabilities. Many old philosophical questions are now best discussed
in design mode, which is why I am in a School of Computer Science,
although I am actually a philosopher.

Engineers, whether concerned with large scale or small scale, with
physical structures or abstract software structures, all have to think
about designs. However our understanding of the space of possible
designs is still very primitive. Unfortunately many people whose
knowledge about designs for working systems is very shallow presume they
have a deep understanding and can make pronouncements about what certain
classes of designs can and cannot do, e.g. pronouncements about the
likelihood, or the impossibility, of computer-based systems having
consciousness.

Conceptual questions are commonplace both in philosophy (e.g. attempts
to clarify what we mean by words like "good", "true", "possible",
"experience") and in deep science. Examples are Einstein's analysis of
the concept of "simultaneity", biologists' attempts to clarify concepts
like "function", "gene", "species", and the struggles of modern
physicists to clarify concepts used in quantum mechanics.

Part of my criticism of much writing on consciousness is that it ignores
deep and difficult conceptual questions. Authors assume first-hand
knowledge about about consciousness is enough. That's as unjustified as
claiming that long before Einstein we all knew what simultaneity was
because we had first hand knowledge about it.

A mind, or a brain, is, above all, a control system. Many concepts, such
as "consciousness", "pain", "emotion", "personality" cannot be clarified
except via study of possible designs for complex information processing
systems: when we know something about the architecture of a system we
can use that as a basis for generating and classifying concepts
describing the kinds of states that system can be in, just as theories
about the architecture of matter led to a new set of concepts about
kinds of stuff, e.g. in the periodic table. We have yet to develop an
architecture-based periodic table for the mind.

Many who think they know about consciousness from direct acquaintance
claim that there is a binary division (a dichotomy) between things that
do and do not have consciousness, or a binary division between states in
which we are conscious and states when we are not, or a binary division
between those things of which are are conscious at a time and those of
which we are not.

That illusion tempts us to ask questions such as 'Which animals have
consciousness and which don't?' How did 'it' evolve?  Does 'it' have a
biological function?  Is 'it' reducible to physics? Could a robot have
'it'?  Could software running in a computer have 'it'?  Could there be a
machine which is a "zombie", with all the appearance and behaviour
normally associated with consciousness but totally lacking 'it'?  All
these (and many other) questions become vacuous if the concept of
consciousness turns out to be a muddled collection of very different
concepts.

The enormous diversity among living things (e.g. sunflowers, carnivorous
plants, amoebas, rats, bonobos) reveals no obvious place to draw the
line. Similarly when a foetus develops, it is at first simply a cell and
then it starts dividing. Eventually it pops out and yells, and after a
few more years gives lectures on philosophy. Is there a time at which it
switches from something without consciousness to something that not only
has 'it', but talks about 'it'?

Later the individual may have a degenerative brain disease, suffering
slow degradation until what is left is just a "vegetable" (or rather a
piece of meat). At what point does consciousness cease?

Here's an example illustrating the ambiguity regarding what is in 'it'.
Many people will have seen this phrase, often shown displayed inside
a triangle:

                               A
                              BIRD
                             IN THE
                            THE HAND

People can stare at it and not see anything wrong, even when
told there is something wrong (e.g. a subset of those reading this). Yet
if they are told to shut their eyes and then asked certain questions
(such as how many words there are, or where the "the" is), they
sometimes realise that they did see something wrong. They saw it, but
they somehow did not pay attention to it. Were they somehow conscious
of it and not conscious of it at the same time?

Susan Greenfield, who gave the lecture preceding this one, mentioned
several of these problems. Her response was that there is no dichotomy,
but a continuum: i.e. there is no sharp division between things with and
without consciousness, or between what you are and are not conscious of,
because it is all a matter of degree.

I think this is partly correct, but also dangerously misleading: because
the idea of a smooth continuum here is wrong. What many people don't
realise is that a continuum is not the only alternative to a single
major discontinuity.

There could be large number of different discontinuities. If so, we can
embark on the exciting research programme of exploring all the myriad
divisions, instead of seeking the mythical unique boundary line, or
wallowing in the intellectually un-challenging idea that there are no
divisions.

So, while there is no dichotomy (no sharp distinction between things
with and without consciousness or between the things we are and are not
conscious of) it is also a mistake to think we can avoid the problems by
thinking of consciousness as just a matter of degree.

Of course there are lots of differences of degree between animals,
but accepting that leaves out a much more important truth, namely that
we are talking about a {\em cluster} concept. To say "consciousness" is
a cluster concept is to say that it is neither something unitary that is
present or absent, nor something smoothly varying in degree: rather it
involves a large cluster of recombinable capabilities which can be
present or absent in different combinations. They are not simply things
that vary in quantity.  They are different in their function, structure,
origins, and ways of going wrong. Those are differences in kind, not in
degree.

Different subsets of the cluster can occur in different organisms, in
different sorts of machines, different people (we are not all exactly
the same - we have different kinds of capabilities). Even in the same
person at different times the collection of capabilities may change:
between infancy, childhood and adulthood and in senile dementia, brain
injury and so on.

When I say consciousness is a cluster concept involving a collection of
properties -- a, b, c, d, e, etc. -- I am not saying that consciousness
is some logical combination of them such as a disjunction, conjunction
of disjunctions or disjunction of conjunctions or whatever.

The concept has a kind of indeterminacy as to what is and is not
required in its instances, partly because our grasp of what is possible
is too limited for us to have clear notions about how to divide things
up, and partly because our previous history has not forced us to agree
on such criteria. So cluster concepts can be indeterminate, and
consciousness is no exception.

What sorts of capabilities are involved in this concept? I have space
only for a few examples. Readers may be able to produce many more.

Humans have many kinds of perceptual capabilities. Being able to
recognise something as an 'a', a 'b' or a particular word, is different
from interpreting it as having a meaning. I.e. recognizing objects is
different from interpreting them. Another sort of interpretative
capability involves the ability to use vision to derive a rich
three-dimensional structure from two-dimensional patterns of stimulation
on the retina.

Yet another profound capability is the ability not only to perceive
structures, but also possibilities and constraints on possibilities, for
instance, seeing that a window catch admits certain possible states and
some of those states constrain motion of the window. Not all people can
see the same possibilities and constraints. Cultures can vary, just as
animals do.

There are also different sorts of memory capabilities. There are
short-term memories, like the ability to store and repeat the numbers 7,
3, 5, 2, 8, 2. The ability to remember some things for longer may enable
an animal to recall that it has a nest a long way from its current
location, and remember how to get back there.

Humans also have an important ability to remember things concerned with
the future! E.g. we often need to contemplate several possible future
actions and events and move back and forth between them before deciding.
Here short term memory is not concerned with remembering facts, but
remembering what might be.

There are also many kinds of learning and many kinds of motivational
processes (feeling hungry, thirsty, sleepy, tired, hot, cold, sexy or
wanting to solve a mathematical or philosophical problem). Humans at
least, have what we call moral feelings or can feel indignation about
what is being done to something else. I don't know how many other
animals can do that.

Another class of capabilities involve self monitoring and self control.
You can not only look at things around you and do things, but you can
also attend to what you are looking at, think about what you are paying
attention to, and notice aspects of your experience, such as how what
you see varies as you move, without which much art would be impossible.

Sometimes we control ourselves e.g. deciding to cease dwelling on
yesterday's humiliating experience and instead pay attention to an
important task. But sometimes we fail. So we also have the ability to
lose control of our thought processes, at least partly. How many other
animals can monitor and control thought processes, and partially lose
control? Those that cannot are incapable of certain sorts of emotional
states, which I call "perturbant".

These hurried and shallow comments list only a tiny fragment of the vast
collection of capabilities that make up what it is to be a human being
and which are all aspects of our having experiences and being conscious.

Different sub-collections may be present in different people, in
different organisms, the same person at different times and maybe in
machines. Asking which ones constitute consciousness is pointless: the
concept is too indeterminate for there to be any answer. And in any case
there are far more important questions concerning the study of all these
different capabilities, the mechanisms underlying them, how they
evolved, which ones can be implemented in computers, and so on.

We need to study "design space": the space of possible designs for
systems, with different combinations of capabilities. This is linked to
another kind of space, "niche space", which is partly what biologists
study when they talk about the niche of an organism and partly what
engineers study when they talk about the requirements against which a
design is to be evaluated. Niche space and design space are both very
complex structures, and the mappings between them are very complex. What
are the dynamics of these spaces: what sorts of trajectories are
possible within them? Which sorts can occur in individual development?
(As far as I know, it is not physically or chemically possible for a
human egg to evolve into a giraffe, no matter how its environment is
manipulated.) Which sorts of trajectories require evolution across
generations involving many individuals? Which can occur in a laboratory?

Different combinations of capabilities correspond to different designs.
Designing an overhead projector involves combining physical capabilities
and some cognitive ones (it should be easy to find the controls).
Designing a piece of software involves combining more abstract
abilities, for instance to calculate, reformat a document, check
spelling or grammar, solve puzzles. Some designs inherently involve a
particular physical implementation (e.g. a violin) whereas others admit
considerable variety in their implementation (e.g. a particular type of
word processor may run on computers with very different physical
structures).

Evolution also produces designs -- even though there is no designer or
engineer, just natural selection. The notion of a design is an
abstraction that has nothing to do with how the design was produced, or
whether any agent intends it to serve any purposes. In that sense the
design of a bee fits the requirement to pollinate plants.

I see "Artificial Intelligence" as a misnomer for a field involving
increasingly deep and broad study of regions of design space and regions
of niche space, including both natural and artificial systems, and
including both those that already exist and those that might exist.
Cognitive science is the subset of AI that studies the region of human
and animal designs. We still do not know much about the overall
structure of design space, nor which kinds of mechanisms are needed as
substructures for particular sorts of designs. Nor do we know much about
the classes of designs that are relevant to characteristically human
capabilities.

So, pontificating about whether machines can or cannot be conscious or
about whether consciousness does or does not need quantum gravity
engines, seems to me to be just silly. There is far too much research
still to be done, and then instead of asking a few big, but empty and
largely unanswerable, questions about consciousness we can ask, and
perhaps answer, a large number of smaller, fascinating questions about
all the myriad components of the cluster.

We can study different ways in which transitions can occur from one
collection of capabilities to another. Some involve change within an
individual, some may not be capable of occurring without an evolutionary
process involving generations of individuals. Perhaps an evolutionary
process could produce human beings with a strong ability to detect
magnetic fields.

Understanding the characteristically human cluster of capabilities
requires good understanding of how these are composed of layers with
different evolutionary histories.

For example one kind of agent involves a purely reactive control
mechanism. Information is acquired through external sensors and internal
monitors and propagates through and around the system, and out to
effectors of various kinds. Everything happens in parallel because there
are dedicated coexisting circuits.

I presume there are many organisms like that, and I believe that older,
more primitive parts of the human brain are like that.

Another architectural layer, a "management" mechanism is able to
consider options in advance, evaluate them and select between them,
including constructing new forms of action, for instance making a new
plan. This sort of mechanism, instead of having a lot of hardware
dedicated to parallel activities may have a common store of temporary
memory for constructing these "advance" representations, and a common
associative memory used to guide the construction evaluation and
selection. For a variety of reasons, such a system, though implemented
in intrinsically parallel mechanisms, is intrinsically {\em serial} in
its functionality. This means it is a powerful resource that has to be
shared between different goals and needs. Some of the mechanisms for
controlling the resource allocation, and directing it towards
self-improvement could include complex filters, and mechanisms involved
in what we loosely describe as reward and punishment. I presume that
only the more sophisticated animals have these abstract management
mechanisms.

With colleagues at Birmingham I have been exploring the notion of a
third level of architecture, which, in evolutionary terms, would be even
more recent, and possibly a lot more rare. This involves a
"meta-management" system which can monitor the strategies and behaviour
of the management system (and possibly also the meta-management system)
and take corrective action when the individual decisions do not seem to
be producing an overall state that is valued highly. An example from
human life might be noticing that one is switching attention between
tasks too frequently, with consequent loss of efficiency. Corrective
action might involve deciding to ignore interrupts and new motives for a
time. Such control at the meta-management level is not perfect: we
sometimes decide, and want, to think about X, but are continually drawn
back to thinking about Y.

These three layers in the proposed architecture, the automatic reactive
processing layer, the management layer which can construct and
contemplate options in advance, and the metamanagement layer which can
monitor, evaluate, and redirect high level internal actions, may each
add new kinds of capabilities compared with earlier, simpler systems.
Trying to treat them as part of a continuum is therefore seriously
misleading. Moreover, within each layer there can be a large collection
of distinct capabilities, which can be present or absent in different
combinations, adding to the diversity of designs, and discontinuities in
design space.

Some of these, associated with a rich perceptual architecture, can, I
believe,  account for the phenomena that make many people wish to talk
about "qualia" and "subjective experience", for these are
viewer-dependent aspects of perceptual states. The ability to pay
attention to our own experience is different from the ability to have
the experience (i.e. the ability to see what is out there). Being able
to attend to the experience can be useful for some purposes (drawing
things, telling others how things look to us, etc.) I do not know how
many other animals which have sensory experiences also have the ability
to attend to them, to report them, to compare them.

I'll now return to the conceptual questions. Each design for an
architecture determines (together with the environment) a variety of
states and processes that that architecture can support. This produces a
family of concepts: "theory based" concepts, grounded in the
architecture. These theory based concepts can elaborate and extend
common sense concepts. (In my examples I have tried to indicate links
with common sense concepts.)

I anticipate such a process of conceptual evolution in philosophy,
psychology and biology to some extent paralleling the conceptual
evolution in physics and chemistry that grew out of a new hypothesised
architecture for matter.

These new concepts enable us to ask new questions. Instead of asking
which animals are conscious and which are not, we might, for instance,
talk about 75 different kinds of consciousness, and ask which animals
have this kind, which have that kind, and when do we have this kind, and
which kind do we lose when we have Alzheimer's disease, and which subset
do we have when we are very young and so on.

We should not explore only one architecture or build one type of robot,
but think about varieties of architectures and trajectories in design
space and niche space. Only in terms of similarities and differences can
we understand any particular architecture.

These problems are very hard and progress will be slow, but the prizes
to be won are high.

If we have an architecture-based understanding, we can get a much deeper
understanding of how a human mind normally works and also how it might
go wrong: the more complex the architecture, the more ways it can go
wrong. By applying all these ideas, we should be able to help therapy,
counselling and education.  Most educational theories are based on no
understanding of what kind of mechanism we are talking about, just a lot
of hunches and rules of thumb.

We can also generate new empirical questions expressed using new
concepts.

We may find that most high level human-like architectures can be
implemented on a number of different sorts of low level mechanisms --
for instance, computer-based mechanisms.  I do not know:  we might have
to invent new mechanisms. We been trying to explore what computers can
do for only forty or fifty years. A comprehensive overview may take
hundreds of years. We may discover all sorts of new mechanisms. And we
might find that if you get the global architecture right, you can get
the right kind of system, on the basis of several {\em different}
implementation mechanisms with sufficient richness and structural
variability.

I expect that the systems approach will show that {\em architecture
dominates mechanism}.

[end]
